OTD in early British television: 10 January 1938
John Wyver writes: tucked into the evening schedule on Monday 10 January 1938 was a ten-minute broadcast titled Alexander Calder’s Mobiles, and there’s a case to be made for this as the first television programme conceived as visual art; not, that is, a programme about painting or sculpture, but rather a pure aesthetic object aspiring to its own creative autonomy.
The broadcast, produced by Mary Adams, simply put before the cameras in studio B at Alexandra Palace a selection of American sculptor Alexander Calder’s ‘mobiles and stabiles’ that had recently been on view, from 1 December to Christmas Eve, at London’s Mayor Gallery (exhibition invite above), and accompanied them with poetry readings and records of Balinese musical compositions.
The excellent website of the Calder Foundation has a very helpful timeline of the artist’s career that includes the exceptional photograph below of the artist at the Mayor Gallery with his mobile ‘Untitled’, c. 1936.
A diarist for the Daily Telegraph visited the exhibition, finding
a most astonishing collection of gadgets which [the artist] calls “abstractions which move and objects to please”. They are difficult to describe but amusing to watch. They are all the rage in the United States.
The paper’s art critic T.W. Earp was similarly engaged by a show
whose entertainment value is out of the ordinary. It might be a miniature funfair devised by a professor of physics in holiday mood. A mobile… is a new kind of indoor or outdoor ornament, at once an adventure in form and motion, and a gay variation on the bleaker aspects of abstract sculpture.
The Listener was a little more sniffy:
It is not impossible to see [the works’] relationship to the paintings of Miró and Klee, and Calder’s enthusiastic admirers do not hesitate to give him an equal rank with these modern artists.
Art that moved must have had an obvious attraction for producer Mary Adams in her constant search for new ways of presenting ideas and culture on screen. What is far less clear, however, is why she went full-on modernist with a choice of accompanying poetry that comprised Osbert Sitwell’s ‘On the coast of Coromandel’, sister Edith’s ‘The King of China’s daughter’, William Empson’s ‘Arachne’, Peter Quennell’s ‘Procne’, and ‘Pied beauty’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The other readings spoken by marine biologist, Criterion contributor, friend of T.S. Eliot, and broadcaster Geoffrey Tandy were ‘Watching the soft advance’ by Museum of Modern Art curator James Johnson Sweeney (who may have served as an advisor on the broadcast, and who would write the catalogue text for Calder’s 1943 show at MoMA), and ‘The main deep’ by Irish novelist and poet James Stephens.
If any scholar of literary modernism can identify links between these works and their authors, and especially possible connections with Calder, I’d love to know of them. Similarly, I would welcome any light that can be thrown on the choice to accompany the works and the words with Balinese music from Parlophone recordings of the time.
Following this modest broadcast, and almost certainly entirely unconnected with it, Calder’s works attracted the attention of independent filmmakers, including for the MoMA productions Alexander Calder: Sculpture and Constructions (1943) and Works of Calder (1950), both made by cinematographer Herbert Matter and the latter with a John Cage score, and the better-known 1963 film directed by Hans Richter, Alexander Calder: From the Circus to the Moon, which can be viewed by clicking on the link.
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